“Seeing-being seen”: A Response to Green’s The Eyes of the People

Lars Tønder, Northwestern University

The chiasm, reversibility, is the idea that every perception is doubled with a counter-perception…, is an act with two faces, one no longer

knows who speaks and who listens. Speaking-listening, seeing-being seen, perceiving-being perceived circularity…Activity = passivity.

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1960)1

My aim in this reply is to examine what I take to be the central assumption behind

Green’s contribution to contemporary democratic theory—that vision entails a passive

mode of power, which typifies “the modern experience of being-ruled” (Green, 40).

Regardless of whether or not Green is right to say that “vision” has become more

important than “voice,” this assumption seems crucial for how we might conceptualize

the agency afforded to citizens who, as Green suggests, associate politics with press

conferences, presidential inaugurals, and other type of spectatorship. Is Green right to say

that these citizens embody a political power that “does not realize itself in terms of active

participation” (Green, 37)? Or does such an account elide a fundamental aspect of visual

perception, namely, that the eye participates in what it sees, engendering a mode of

empowerment that, as Merleau-Ponty suggests in the above epigraph, makes it difficult to

distinguish between seeing and being-seen, ruling and being-ruled?

To get some traction on this issue, let us consider Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, a

play that Green sees as foundational for his own argument because it links the “central

meaning of plebiscitary democracy” to the “empowerment of the People in its capacity as

spectator” (Green, 131). The play’s attention to plebiscitary power and spectatorship is

1 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 264 (emphasis in original).

1

particularly evident in Act II, where Coriolanus, elected by the Roman Senate to become

the next Consul, must appear publicly in the “gown of humility” (II.iii.41) so as to please

the People. If I understand Green right, this sequence of events is uniquely relevant for

the ocular model of democracy because it shows how the People, as a spectator, can

assert its power passively rather than actively. According to Green, the People’s passive

power of vision is further expanded in Act III, where Coriolanus is forced to reappear in

public in order to recant his statements about the People’s mob-like character. As Green

sees it, this reappearance confirms the People’s role as a passive spectator that

“supervises” and “inspects” (Green, 134). Moreover, it leads to a situation where the

government of Rome can benefit from “the spontaneous and unscripted appeal of a

historical individual under conditions of pressure and intensity” (Green, 137).

Green is undoubtedly right to highlight the many parallels between this

historically informed situation and the one that defines many contemporary Western-style

democracies. Still, I wonder whether his interpretation of Coriolanus misses how a

playwright like Shakespeare might want us to envision the relationship between the

leader and the People, something that in turn may change how we conceptualize the

power of vision, creating a more active mode of empowerment than the one suggested by

Green himself. To see how this might be the case, we need to shift our analytical gaze

from the actions of Coriolanus and the People to the conditions that enable both of them

to act in the first place. In second act of the play, for example, we learn that Coriolanus

must appear publicly because he is expected to show, “as is manner, his wounds” to the

people (II.i.261; my emphasis). Later, in scene 2 of Act II, where Coriolanus expresses

his reluctance to follow the usual script of public appearance, two of the tribunes insist

2

that Coriolanus has no other choice than to step forward because the People demands a

“jot of ceremony,” and because all Consuls must adhere “to the custom” (II.ii.166, 168;

my emphases). And finally, right before Coriolanus solicits votes from a smaller group of

plebeians, the play characterizes the power of the People as a “no power to do,” which, as

one citizen says, creates the expectation that if Coriolanus indeed shows his wounds, “we

are to put our tongues into those wounds and speak for them” (II.iii.5–8). This

expectation defines much of what follows in the play: “Ingratitude is monstrous, and for

the multitude to be ingrateful were to make a monster of the multitude, of which we,

being members, should bring ourselves to be monstrous members” (II.iii.10–13).

“Monstrosity,” “ingratitude,” and putting “our tongues into those wounds and

speak for them”—these phrases do not depict a situation in which one entity (“the

People”) supervises and inspects another (“the leader”); rather, they point to a multi-

layered process that empowers both sides of the relationship, crossing the line between

“active” and “passive” modes of power. Further evidence of this crossing can be found in

the wounds that Coriolanus suffered during the campaign against the Volscian army.

Although a modern reader might think that this experience is too private to be shared, this

is not the case in Shakespeare’s world where the wounds play a central role, linking the

fate of Coriolanus to the fate of the People, creating the medium needed for each side to

“see” and “be-seen” by the other. As Shakespeare’s play makes evident, the conditions

for this visibility are neither fixed nor transparent: the wounds of Coriolanus are indeed

seen, but only from a distance where they appear through a cloud of frames, customs, and

practices of circulation. Even Coriolanus himself is unsure whether the wounds really

matter. Thus, when one citizen says “we are to put our tongues into those wounds and

3

speak for them,” we should not read Shakespeare as suggesting a one-directional

relationship between an “active” leader and a “passive” People. Rather, it might be better

to say that Shakespeare envisions a chiasmic relationship between them, one in which the

appearance of the wounds is crucial for both the leader and the People. What matters, you

might say, is not who is “active” and who is “passive” but rather how both sides belong

to and feed off a multi-layered process that allows each of them to shine forth more

powerfully than before, making them concurrently active and passive, seeing and being-

seen, ruler and being-ruled.

As already indicated, I believe that a particular good way to approach this

confluence of the active and the passive goes through the work of the French philosopher

Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Augmenting the participatory elements of Green’s ocular model

of democracy, foregrounding a framework closer to Shakespeare’s account of the

relationship between the leader and the People, Merleau-Ponty’s work is particularly

helpful because it allows us to see how the confluence of the active and the passive can

open up for new, more participatory modes of democratic engagement.2 According to

Merleau-Ponty, we can begin to see how this might be the case by noticing three aspects

of the relationship between seeing and being-seen: (1) seeing and being-seen are two

aspects of the same spectatorial context, making it impossible to define the power of one

without also defining the power of the other; (2) as aspects of the same spectatorial

context, seeing and being-seen rely on the visual frames and affective contexts that

2 Among the many thinkers discussed in The Eyes of the People, Foucault and Sartre are closest to Merleau-Ponty. Like Foucault and Sartre, Merleau-Ponty develops his argument through an engagement with the tradition of phenomenology in which perception (and thus vision) is paramount to the conceptualization of lived experience. Unlike Foucault and Sartre, however, Merleau-Ponty does not see the power of vision as one-directional or tied exclusively to a form of surveillance but instead seeks to disclose its incompleteness and complicity with the unseen. For Merleau-Ponty, vision is always-already pluralistic as it discloses the world in this or that way.

4

underpin and sustain the very appearance of a spectacle; and (3) given their shared

reliance on the appearance of a spectacle, seeing and being-seen are not ontologically

separate but instead emerge from a two-way process that allows for a continuous shifting

of places, making them two sides of the same coin.3 The seer, you might say, is complicit

in what is seen. Or as Merleau-Ponty puts it in a discussion of a painting by Cezanne: to

see the painting is to be “reached” by it and then to resume “the gesture through which it

was made.”4

Green’s justification for not attending to this confluence of the active and the

passive is empirical-sociological: in an age like ours, one in which the gap between the

rulers and the ruled is greater than ever, ordinary citizens are reduced to spectators rather

than participants. This observation is obviously relevant and should be part of any theory

of democracy that wants to honor the facts of contemporary politics. But I still worry that

the way Green posits a sharp distinction between “active” and “passive” tilts the analysis

toward a limited, even uncritical account of the “eyes of the people.” Given what we

already have seen, this worry is twofold. Most obvious is how Green’s attention to the

visibly seen misses the importance of framing and circulation, precluding an account of

how the People’s alleged passivity hides a degree of active participation that makes it

more entangled with the political leadership than it may seem at first. As Shakespeare’s

Coriolanus reminds us, there may indeed be times where the People desires to be passive,

demanding a “jolt of ceremony” that will put it in the position of a mob-like spectator.

But equally important is the opposite possibility anticipated by Merleau-Ponty in

3 For elaboration of this reading of Merleau-Ponty, see my discussion in Tolerance: A Sensorial Orientation to Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), Chapter 4.4 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, trans. John O’Neill (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 55.

5

particular—namely, that the People’s entanglement with the political leadership endows

it with more resources for resistance and reframing than acknowledged by Green’s

analysis of late modern democracies. In less overt ways, this possibility also follows from

Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, which stresses the need for the People to touch the wounds of

its leaders before they can appear as legitimate and powerful. It may be that this touching

has been covered up by the operations of a late modern media-machine that makes all

aspects of democratic politics seem smooth and efficient. Still, if Shakespeare is right,

and if the People and the leadership are intimately entangled with each other, then the

question is not whether but how to mobilize the entanglement in a more democratic

manner than heretofore. To put it in the terms of Coriolanus, how might the People’s

touch be framed, mediated, and circulated in a manner that augments rather than limits

the continuous interactions between the ruler and the being-ruled, the seeing and the

being-seen?

The argument developed in this reply suggests that to answer this question we

must first focus on what Green for the most part leaves untouched, attending to the

historical specificity of spectacle-formation, focusing on how the availability of frames,

media, and modes of circulation change in conjunction with the emergence of new

techniques of culture, discourse, and vision. It almost goes without saying that in this

context the use of Shakespeare for the purposes of conceptualizing the challenges of

contemporary democracy becomes rather limited. Indeed, although Shakespeare’s regime

of visibility resembles the one that historically has been associated with the camera

obscura—an optical device that allows the spectator to simultaneously observe and

6

participate in the power of vision5—the difference between Shakespeare’s age and ours is

that today the power of vision is depicted and put into motion through a flow of images

screened on personal devices such as computers, tablets, and smart phones. Unique to

these devices is the ability to chop up images of the visibly seen and then reassembling

them in ways that neither track chronological time nor acknowledge the traditional

coordinates of perceptual experience, including up and down, left and right, front and

back. Moreover, as examples of twenty first century techniques of framing and

mediation, the devices suggest that our present-day regime of visibility has shifted from

an ideal based on authentic representation and moved toward an ideal based on creative

discontinuity. Another way of saying this is that authentic representation no longer is an

option given the emergence of new media techniques and their implications for framing,

mediation, and circulation. This, in turn, changes the task of critical normative thinking:

rather than looking for ways to empower the kind of candid and unscripted events that

Green favors, the critical normative task today is to mobilize the power of vision

creatively, augmenting and pluralizing the freedom associated with a regimes of visibility

based on techniques of discontinuity and interruption.

It is in the context of this task that a chiasmic conceptualization of the relationship

between seeing and being-seen may enable us to unearth new, more participatory

possibilities for democratic empowerment. As Davide Panagia recently has argued, new

possibilities for active democratic empowerment may indeed rely on the chopping up of

images that characterizes the current regime of visibility—what Panagia calls “the

5 On the camera obscura and its importance for visual culture, see Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), esp. Chapter 3.

7

stochastic serialization of moving images.”6 Such serialization may not guarantee more

democracy (as if one could ever reduce democracy to something measurable) but it does

suggest that the power of vision can be mobilized in ways that are neither autonomous in

the manner posited by neo-Kantian democratic theory nor limited to the kind of

inspection and supervision that Green suggests as the most realistic alternative. Consider

for example the spectacles surrounding movements such as Occupy Wall Street and the

Arab Spring. Despite differences in local contexts, the spectacles associated with these

movements could be read as exploiting contemporary media techniques in order to create

counter-images that invite the spectator into the frame as an active participant. Exposing

the limits of government is part of this invitation, but so is the desire to exploit the gaps

latent in the existing series of images. A ballerina on Wall Street’s “Charging Bull” or the

carnivalesque celebrations at Tariq Square in Cairo—these images do more than

subjecting governments to inspection and supervision: they mobilize the power of vision

to actively displace the present in favor of a different future.

The recent cooptation of these images by more traditional regimes of politics

suggests that the democratizing power of vision is a fragile and that more work is needed

in order to identify the conditions under which it might contribute to active participation

in the government of late modern democracies. Thus, I conclude by noting a fundamental

agreement with Green: given the increased importance of visual media in contemporary

politics, it is imperative that democratic theorists take up the task of theorizing the power

of vision. As I have suggested here, in addition to Green’s insights such a theorization

may benefit from an engagement with Merleau-Ponty’s account of relationship between

6 Davide Panagia, “Why Film Matters to Political Theory,” Contemporary Political Theory, vol. 12, no. 1 (2013), p. 2.

8

seeing and being-seen, supplementing the concern for reactive forms of inspection and

supervision with attention to chiasmic terms that cross the divide between active and

passive, seeing and being-seen, ruling and being-ruled.

9